GEOFFREY HEPTONSTALL
Later The Same Evening
Later the same evening,
Or another night entirely,
When I opened the door
Then I heard music
From a neighbouring farm.
Suddenly there was requiem
For the old man’s going.
He could be heard leaving
With a forgotten son
In a vacant house.
He went in a breathless moment
Earlier, before noon,
From his few, poor acres.
Soon there were houses rising,
And the farm itself had died.
There comes a country living
Without the sound of cattle
And the crackle of harvest corn.
The last of the long grass glistens.
The cutter lies down to sleep.
There was rain falling
When I came close.
And resurrection
Gently touched my face,
My hopes murmuring.
When I saw, in splendor,
A dream laid down,
Like a courtier’s cloak before her,
The Queen of Elsewhere,
Pausing before passing by.
In The Novel Café, Ocean Park Boulevard
We were looking at the highway to China,
And the mountains in the sky
Were threatening storms
That passed in the spring winds.
Downtown would soon be dark.
On the boardwalk came the blues
Of an ageing man whose feelings
Were ancestral pain
The ocean will not wash away.
Better to sing than to die.
These things we see by chance,
Like city lights celestial in the rain,
Or something overheard about Idaho,
And snow falls out of season.
Then there is the history of corn:
Reading how the Ancients of America
Found in the wild the saving grace
Of what became corn.
Buttered lightly, it beckons
A continent to consume.
We see Aztecs and ox-wagons,
Empires and pioneers,
Feasting on corn.
A history of the Americas
Here is served every day.
Geoffrey Heptonstall is a writer of fiction (recently for Cerise Press, Every Writer’s Resource, Gold Dust, Litro, Open Wide, Sunk Island Review and Vintage Script).
His essays and reviews have appeared in The Bow-Wow Shop, Cerise Press, Contemporary Review, Gold Dust, International Times,The London Magazine, New Walk Magazine, PN Review, Prole, The Recusant, The Tablet, The TLS and The Write Place At The Write Time; and recent poetry has been published in Connections, Inclement, Ink, Sweat & Tears, International Literary Quarterly, Poetry and Audience, and The Write Place At The Write Time.
Geoffrey lives Cambridge, England, and travels a lot.
